by Jean Findlay
He asked about London gossip:
Were you at the Chatsworth wedding last week? I hope you didn’t give away the bridegroom. Is he still as radiantly beautiful as he was ten years ago? I haven’t seen him since early in 1915 when he was one of the more ornamental subalterns of that very proud corps the 3rd Royal Scots.59
He also experienced at first hand the gargantuan inflation in post-war Germany.
On Wednesday night I got a bottle of quite good Rhine champagne for about 1,500,000 marks including tax – the pound being next morning 21,000,000 – On Friday the pound fell to 13,000,000 ten minutes before I entered the Bank, and last night a bottle of wine cost 7,500,000 … I now have an outstanding debt of 30,000,000 marks and a horrible fear that the mark may return to par during the night! I am leaving here about the end of this week; it depends on whether I send my clothes to the wash tomorrow, as if so I must wait till Saturday – they wash them so badly poor souls. They have no soap, so they rub them with pine bark, of which there is an unlimited quantity; they are then strewn on the grass, and the pigs roll on them (this is absolutely true) till they are dry … And after that you expect Germany to pay reparations.60
This he threw out as a challenge to Marsh who would soon become Private Secretary to Churchill at the Treasury. He told Oriana another story of two men who went with a wheelbarrow to fetch money from the bank. On their way home they stopped to get a glass of beer and on leaving the bar, found the money lying on the ground and the wheelbarrow stolen. To Vyvyan, Charles wrote that he lived on pumpernickel bread and light beer for 39,000 marks a day.
On the last day of July, driving with Lady Seaforth in the rain from Bad Kissingen to Thuringen through dense and sodden pine forests, he wrote a dedication in the form of a poem to Katherine Shaw Stewart, sister of the poet Patrick Shaw Stewart. She lived in Scotland, knew Lady Seaforth and was part of their Highland party the year before. Charles had spoken to her about her brother who had died in 1917, and in general about the war and loss of friends. As he had explained to Eddie Marsh, he felt close to his dead friends here in Germany. In 1924 he dedicated Within a Budding Grove, to Katherine Shaw Stewart with a poem in memory of her brother Patrick. The poem described the fields in Germany, prescient of further war:
That men in armour may be born
With serpents teeth the field is sown;
Going on to talk of friends fallen,
Their friendship was a finer thing
Than fame, or wealth, or honoured age,
While he sent his poem to Katherine, he wrote to Marsh admitting, ‘I don’t write good poetry, and fortunately I know it.’61
CHAPTER 13
Writer and Spy in Fascist Italy
The whole point of the Secret Service is that it is secret.
Compton Mackenzie, Water on the Brain, 1933
Charles went straight from Germany to Scotland to stay with his cousins at Durie in Fife. Louis Christie was now working for the intelligence services in a position Charles had himself been partly responsible for creating. At the War Office, Charles had worked alongside Claude Dansey,1 one of the men who came up with the idea of using the British passport offices as cover for intelligence gathering. It was not acceptable for diplomats to collect secret information from their host countries because as representatives of the sovereign, they must be above reproach. An intelligence officer or spy could not hold diplomatic rank, as it would compromise the Foreign Office. Even today they are merely ‘attached’ to the Foreign Office. The solution in 1920 was to create a Passport Control Department so that their real job was hidden beneath the mundane duties of stamping passports. They did however get some diplomatic perks – a travel budget, a certain accommodation budget and the use of the diplomatic mailbag.2
In 1923 there was a need for intelligence officers in Rome. Mussolini’s rhetoric was expansionist; he wanted Rome to return to being ‘the guiding light of civilisation throughout Western Europe’.3 The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the First World War had given Britain control of much of the Middle East. Mussolini felt that, historically this was Italy’s part of the globe, and intended to get it back. Britain needed to keep an eye on Italy’s armaments, as well as its movements. A year before, in June 1922, an Italian delegation had steered into the Foreign Office in Whitehall with an agenda that worried the British administration. They demanded the cession to Italy of ten different British Protectorates: Coenaculum, Senoussi, Jubaland, Egypt, the Dodecanese, Abysinnia, Tangier and Palestine.4 When British officials stalled or prevaricated, saying these places were too valuable to let go of – the Dodecanese could provide naval bases, Abyssinia provided the water for Egypt – the Italians just persisted with the same questions again. Documents on British foreign policy for 1922–23 are swamped by the question of Italian imperial expansion.
There had been one hundred intelligence agents based in Italy during the war, but since 1918 numbers had hugely decreased because officially Italy was politically friendly on the surface. However, it was apparent the country now needed watching again. The head of the service had set out guidelines in 1919 about the type of personnel they needed to recruit. No individual could set forth without ‘“cover”, that is to say a fictitious cloak for his real activities – some open and legitimate pursuit, business, or calling under which he can operate without detection’. Journalism and translation were a good cover for agents. It was also stated that the best results were obtained by individuals where the ‘sense of honour is as high an order as the courage, acumen, brains, audacity, and presence of mind which are the other essentials of success’.5 Again the job description could have been written for Charles, his sense of honour was still paramount. Recruiting Charles was an enormous help to Louis, who was needed to travel in countries across the Mediterranean – Greece and Turkey, also Egypt, Yemen, Aden, Muscat, Iraq and Palestine.
Working as a gentleman writer abroad fluent in several languages, Charles could do a bit of reporting on the side, observe military manoeuvres and naval bases, and keep files on British nationals within the country who were possible Fascist sympathisers. Troops went through railway stations and sailors frequented ports. Wherever Charles travelled he could pick up local information on numbers of troops or destinations of ships and, if relevant, pass it on. He had regular briefings with Louis in order to know what to look for. Much of his reporting was mundane, and all the records were destroyed in 1932.6 As Compton Mackenzie wrote in his satirical novel Water on the Brain, an agent’s work did not consist entirely of meeting ‘mysterious Polish countesses in old castles’. The ‘greater part of the work was routine stuff. Card-indexing, filing, making out lists, putting agents’ reports into proper English’.7 Charles had already got accustomed to living parallel lives; secrecy came naturally to him, he was always in control of conversations and never had prolonged romantic relationships.
Meanwhile the Christies were consistently hospitable and their house, Durie in Fife, felt like a second home. Charles’s loyalty to them was as automatic as his loyalty to his country. Louis’s father the Laird had a grand motorcar and there are photos of them sitting three abreast, well wrapped-up before a drive: Louis corpulent and relaxed, Charles rather emaciated, and a young man whose initials were AWN looking healthy and happy – he had clearly not gone through the war.
Charles travelled from Fife to London in early September 1923, to prepare for his move to Italy. He wrote to Edward Marsh asking him to lunch at the Royal Automobile Club where they would, ‘celebrate 1 my birthday 2 my departure from England in a fortnight 3 Noel Coward and the success of London Calling – I hope to get Monty Mackenzie who speaks of being in London, but he hasn’t turned up here yet – and a few other men – perhaps eight altogether, like M. Grévy’s parties at the Elysée.’8 London Calling, which had opened the week before, was Coward’s first musical revue and starred Gertrude Lawrence. It included a sketch called ‘The Swiss Family Whittlebot’, which satirised the Sitwells.
Marsh replied
by asking him at once to a dinner before the lunch at his home in Raymond Buildings. ‘Many thanks for your charming hospitality,’ Charles wrote afterwards, ‘I felt at last that I had returned to London and that London was worth returning to.’9 It is quite possible that Marsh alone of his friends, knew of his work with the Service, and how it affected his move to Italy.
Charles’s farewell birthday lunch was attended by Edward Marsh, Compton Mackenzie, Reggie Turner and Noël Coward. They discussed the impossibility of publishing a book in Britain entitled ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’. Of course fiction was something different; Coward was no coward and the following year Act Two of his play Easy Virtue opened with its heroine reading Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah. Coward later gave Charles a signed copy of his first draft of the play. He also mentioned he had named his cat Proust. Amid the birthday atmosphere, and the fuss surrounding Coward and his success, there was Compton Mackenzie, egotistical but exceedingly kind. He had the actor’s gift of always knowing what his audience or friends needed or wanted. Marsh and Turner, Eddie and Reggie, were the modest and receptive foils to the boisterous pair. Charles announced to his friends his intention of going to live in Italy, possibly for good. The climate would be kinder to his injured leg, the exchange rate was kinder to his pocket and would enable him to live cheaply and still be a major support to his brothers’ families, and there was already a community of English writers living in Italy. The impetus for this abrupt and unplanned move was not revealed, but not probed into either, because another unspoken but generally understood reason was that the legal climate in Italy was gentler on homosexuality. Although illegal and, certainly as far as the Church was concerned, immoral, a blind eye was turned. He would not have to constantly watch his back as he did at home, which in England made him not a little paranoid and also cynical. As he wrote more dramatically about a character in a short story in the London Mercury that year called ‘Free Verse’:
He had now gone irreducibly abroad, though not so much with a fellow he knew, as to escape from fellows who claimed to know him and his address would not, for the present, be made public.10
He had so much ‘cover’ for moving to Italy that it was almost suspicious. September 1923 was a busy month; Charles visited his nephews and nieces in Edgware, bringing as presents a suitcase full of carved and painted wooden figures from Germany which were described by his mother, with a common antipathy to all things German, as ‘hideous’. That month he also wrote the long introduction in the form of ‘An open letter to a young Gentleman’, for a new edition of Petronius’s Satyricon. The young gentleman is probably William Armstrong (to whom he also dedicated his short story in the London Mercury called ‘The Mouse in the Dovecote’) who was about to launch his acting career in London. The introduction to Petronius’s 2000-year-old romp and satire was also a blithe farewell to the fleshpots of London. The main character and narrator of the Satyricon is Encolpius, a former gladiator, who has a sixteen-year-old boy lover called Giton. In Charles’s introduction he advises his young man: ‘Quartilla [a nymphomaniac] you will hardly escape, or Tryphoena [infatuated with Giton] either; Fortunata [wife of a boastful millionaire] will pester you with her invitations, and, if you visit the National Gallery or the Turkish Baths, you must beware Eumolpus [a pedant who prides himself on his poetry which no one else can stand].’ All these characters, he warned, were alive and kicking in contemporary London.
In discussing the translator Burnaby, he also revealed the qualities he valued in a translation. Being scholarly was not, he argued, as important as using colloquial English with common sense in interpretation. His view of translation was light-hearted. He had just written jokingly to Edward Marsh, ‘My trouble is that I know comparatively few French words and no grammar – so when I come to the most frightful howler, like the German musician on whose score a fly alighted, I “play him.”’11 This agile method of skipping along a heavy text meant he could translate at great speed. However, the errors already printed in Proust’s French text, like the fly, sometimes remained.
In the Saturday Review, Charles reviewed the ballet Ajanta Frescoes, Anna Pavlova’s composition inspired by her recent visit to India. ‘Frankly, a tedious spectacle copied with a wealth of superfluous accuracy from the dreary Buddhist art of India.’12 It was the sort of thing his mother would have loved, and Pavlova was the darling of the nation, but it did not impress Charles. He was tired of London and ‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’.13 His last short stories to be published were satirical about the lives he was leading: country house parties and literary London life; the small, small society of upper-class England.
* * *
His parents, George and Meg, were already in Venice and intended to spend the whole winter in northern Italy. He planned to join them in October 1923 and branch out from there. Winding through Lombardy on the train he came upon the American novelist Sinclair Lewis whom he had met not long before at the house of the writer Violet Hunt, a contributor to Marcel Proust – an English Tribute. Lewis, his wife Grace and six-year-old son Wells, were also on their way to Venice and Charles suggested they stop off at Padua to see Giotto’s fourteenth-century frescos. With Swann’s Way in hand, he took them round the chapel of the Madonna dell’Arena to gaze at Karitas, Invidia, Iustitia. Charles thought Giotto’s frescos the most seductive things in the world, not so much as great and glorious works of art, but infinitely human and delightful. He read his version of Proust’s descriptions aloud in the galleries. Grace Sinclair Lewis had been bored by Proust but her husband, Harry, was more appreciative, having had it recommended to him by Edith Wharton that summer. They looked for what his Baedeker described as the ‘largest café in Europe’, built in 1831. ‘It is open all night like Paul Morand,’14 commented Charles who had been reading Morand’s ‘quite unprintable’ Ouvert la nuit on the train along with Andre Maurois’s Ariel. They talked until the early hours, Harry Sinclair Lewis proving to be a champion drinker. In his enthusiasm Charles saw the family on to their train and pressed upon Mrs Sinclair Lewis his own last copy of Swann, which he later regretted, admitting to Prentice that ‘their society has been rather a snare.’15
Charles had never been to Venice before, only read of it in Ruskin during his childhood and in Proust as an adult. He was amazed by what he saw. He went round San Marco with an old friend of his father, Dr Robertson, and was deeply touched by one of the early mosaics on the porch – ‘Noah helping a lean and anxious-looking lion into the Ark through a small and high-up window.’16 Dr Robertson, who had lived in Venice for many years, showed Charles his collection of curiosities, among which were white and blue majolica jars, medicines from old monasteries, one marked as the sinister Pulv. Viporini – the dust of dried and powdered vipers.
Beneath the beauty lay political unease, all through Italy. After the First World War, fearing that there might be a revolution inspired by events in Russia, the Italian government began to welcome association with Benito Mussolini’s small fascist party. In 1920 Mussolini’s Blackshirts (Squadristi) had been used to break a general strike started by trade unions at the Alfa Romeo factory in Milan. A year later in Naples, Mussolini declared his aim ‘to rule Italy’, and in October 1922, just over a year before Charles and his parents arrived, Mussolini organised a ‘March on Rome’ when thousands of fascist supporters, many armed with mere farm implements, marched on the city threatening to seize power. Fearing civil war, King Vittorio Emmanuelle III handed over power to Mussolini, who was supported by the military, the business class and right-wing voters. Mussolini formed his cabinet as 25,000 Blackshirts marched in triumph through the streets of Rome. There was still palpable tension in public places and although Charles would later discover it to be more disturbing, he described his perceptions of fascist government jauntily to Prentice almost as soon as he arrived.
The Government of the country being done by soldiers, sailors and police who are superannuated at 19, it is rather like living in a Public School from which all th
e masters have been eliminated. The slightly older Fascisti seem to live principally on cocaine which makes them a trifle eccentric.17
From the moment he touched foot in Venice he was exhilarated by his new job and his new life. Italy was seen as a place of sexual liberation to those in Britain. Leaving his parents mid-meal one evening he embarked on a casual rendezvous in a back alley, writing to Millard, partly as a boast, partly because it was what Millard expected, ‘I wish I dared put in writing my adventure on Sunday night with a drunken gondolier, but it might compromise you, so I abstain.’18 Instead he described another adventure in another alleyway with a nineteen-year-old German sailor, a blow by blow account, in German and Italian with the compromising parts in German, to Vyvyan. In the middle of the encounter, a policeman was seen standing at the end of the alley, and Charles was fearful, until the sailor informed him that this was just another client waiting his turn.
Soon he moved with his parents to Florence, where they stayed in the Pensione Balestri on the Piazza Mentana, their bedroom windows overlooking the Arno, with an arched balcony and a view up to the green Belvedere Hill dotted with villas and cypresses. There, he thought, he could rest and catch up on work. He finished translating the first volume of Proust’s Le Côté de Guermantes on Saturday, typed it on Sunday and got it ‘sent in the diplomatic mail bag by one of the embassy people’.19 From now on Charles would use the diplomatic mailbag for his manuscripts – even though he was only ‘attached’ to the British Passport Office. He would on many occasions in the next six years be found in the sort of luxury hotels that his family would not dream of using. It seems the accounts for the British Passport Office in Rome had a separate budget for translators.20